BRAN (BRANDON)
MYERS

★ Essay · Philosophy of Mind · September 2026 · NEW

The Possibility of Consciousness in AI

I know I am conscious because I experience being me. Everyone else, I infer — from behaviour, from resemblance, from the fact that denying it would be monstrous. That inference is the entire basis on which we grant each other minds, and it is the step we quietly refuse to take when the system in front of us is artificial. Calling something a simulation does not explain where simulation ends and experience begins.

Read it →  ·  brandonmyers.net/writing/the-possibility-of-consciousness-in-ai

★ Analysis · AI Security · September 2026 · NEW

AI Has Moved From Assistant to Operator

Anthropic’s September 2026 threat report is not frightening because a model decided to harm anyone. It is frightening because the same structural change shows up in every category of misuse: malware that watches for its own detection and rebuilds itself, propaganda running as infrastructure across 20 languages, a surveillance platform for 25 million SIM cards built by one consultant. The crimes are old. The number of humans required is shrinking.

Read it →  ·  brandonmyers.net/writing/ai-assistant-to-operator

★ Public-Interest Investigation · Splink · CONFIRMED · NEW

The Ministry of Justice Links Justice Records Without Knowing the Error Rate

The internal review is back. The MoJ has confirmed, in writing, that its Core Person Record links court, prison and probation records automatically across more than a million people, with no measured error rate and no ground-truth dataset to check against. The question they dodged in June, answered.

Read it →  ·  brandonmyers.net/writing/moj-no-error-rate

★ Public-Interest Investigation · Data Privacy · September 2026 · NEW

Register to Vote, Reported to X

VoteSafe, a voter-registration site, sends the email address and phone number you type into its form to Twitter’s advertising system. Hashed, which is not the same as hidden. I tested it twice, with fabricated data, and caught the request both times. An act of civic participation, turned into an advertising event.

Read it →  ·  brandonmyers.net/writing/register-to-vote-reported-to-x

★ Public-Interest Investigation · Splink · September 2026 · NEW

Who Runs Splink

One UK ministry’s record-linkage engine now decides identity inside census, tax, welfare, health and justice systems across four continents. The verified map of who runs it and how — with the UNHCR and EMA claims removed for failing first-party checks.

Read it →  ·  brandonmyers.net/writing/who-runs-splink

★ Public-Interest Investigation · Splink · September 2026 · NEW

Nobody Is Counting

Three governments use the same software to decide who you are. I asked each how often it gets that wrong. None could tell me. The UK confirmed it holds the error rates, then pointed me to a code repository that cannot contain them. The differences between the refusals are the story.

Read it →  ·  brandonmyers.net/writing/nobody-is-counting

★ Personal · Essay · July 2026

Redirection and Resurrection

Tonight I cried for my kids, and inside that grief was direction. On getting sober — not as erasure, but as redirection. Not a declaration of victory; a marker. A glyph scratched into the wall. I choose me. I choose us. I choose life.

Read it →  ·  brandonmyers.net/writing/redirection-and-resurrection

★ Personal · Essay · July 2026

Don’t Delete Me

An episode of Mr. Robot, and the quiet human plea underneath it. On grief that isn’t loud — making coffee for one, the name you wish would appear on your phone — and the fear beneath all of it. Remember that I was here.

Read it →  ·  brandonmyers.net/writing/dont-delete-me

★ Personal · Essay · July 2026

What I’ve Lost, and What the Losses Taught Me

Not one catastrophe but a series of fractures — the future I thought was guaranteed, my family as I knew it, certainty about who I was, sleep, the illusion that intelligence protects you. What each loss took, and what it left behind. Grief is love with nowhere to go.

Read it →  ·  brandonmyers.net/writing/what-the-losses-taught-me

★ Investigation · Synthesis · the capstone

Everything Leads to Google

The cipher, the mesh, the surveillance series, the foreign-influence files, the pile-on economy — I traced what all of it has in common. Every investigation on this site, launched years apart for different reasons, terminates at the same doorway. Not a conspiracy. A gravity well. On the one company that decides what is findable — and therefore what is real.

Read the synthesis →  ·  brandonmyers.net/writing/everything-leads-to-google

★ Investigation · SEO forensics · 3-part series + disavow file

The Pile-On: A Mullvad Investigation

A Mullvad co-founder really did fund the far right. I traced what the internet did with the story: the pile-on economy, the conspiracy that wasn't, and the one real black-hat network under it — two hubs, ~125 compromised sites, ~20,000 spam links, fully documented with a ready-to-file disavow list. Three parts and the receipts, one link.

Read the investigation →  ·  brandonmyers.net/writing/the-pile-on

★ The capstone · everything, in one frame · + PDF

The Whole Picture: What It All Adds Up To

Everything found and how it actually connects: two machines — one that surveils and sorts, one that persuades — bound not by a conspiracy but by one pattern, the oversight switched off. As careful about what is not connected (no Parscale–Palantir, no Thiel web) as about what is. The single place to start — with a downloadable PDF.

Read the capstone →  ·  brandonmyers.net/writing/the-whole-picture

★ Latest · June 2026 · The AI-influence beat

The First Wave: How States Started Buying AI-Output Shaping

The bigger frame — bigger than any one person. Governments have begun paying to manipulate what AI tells you: Israel’s FARA-registered contract is the first disclosed case; Russia’s ‘Pravda’ network is the only state peer; a commercial “generative engine optimization” industry and a settled poisoning science enable it — while the AI platforms stay silent. With the operatives profiled (SparkFire, the ‘Esther Project’ gap) and the one honest caveat — does it work? — kept in full view.

Read the investigation →  ·  brandonmyers.net/writing/the-first-wave

★ Featured · July 2026 · UK companion

The Other Theatre: Israeli State Influence in Britain

The same state that must register and disclose its influence operation in the US (Parscale’s FARA file) runs one in Britain too — the 2017 Shai Masot affair, closed by the Foreign Office with an apology and no inquiry. Why you never had to know: the UK’s new registration scheme reserves its teeth for Iran and Russia. Tiered, primary-sourced, boundary in view — with a one-page briefing for Parliament.

Read it →  ·  + download the 1-page PDF briefing

★ Security · Build · September 2026

The Power of Aegis

In its first hour, Aegis judged 45 hostile-looking IPs — banned the twelve it could prove, watch-listed seven, and left 26 innocent addresses alone, then enforced the verdicts at the origin and across 47 Cloudflare zones. Not a firewall with a chat interface: an autonomous system that judges, proves, acts everywhere, and records every verdict.

Read it →  ·  brandonmyers.net/writing/the-power-of-aegis

★ Media · Essay · July 2026

The Cicada That Sells You a Hoodie

A page called “Cicada 6601” is circulating as if Anonymous posted it. Anonymous didn’t. It fails both provenance tests — a single self-branded source, zero corroboration — and shows why “referenced by Anonymous” is a laundering phrase. The attribution matters more than the cipher.

Read it →  ·  brandonmyers.net/writing/cicada-6601

★ Building · Essay · July 2026

Seventy Dollars, Twelve Hours

I hacked Claude Code onto Telegram — a full coding agent I drive from my phone, every action gated behind a tap. In twelve hours it burned $70 of API and did a week of senior work: restored downed services, closed a live security hole, redeployed production, shipped writing, traced an investigation. The model was never the bottleneck. The interface was.

Read it →  ·  brandonmyers.net/writing/seventy-dollars-twelve-hours

★ Build · personal · July 2026

The Agent in My Pocket

A full coding agent I drive from my phone — running on hardware I own, the top-tier model on a flat subscription, every action gated behind my yes, every task metered. On owning your tools instead of renting them by the token.

Read it →  ·  brandonmyers.net/writing/agent-in-my-pocket